Reliquary / Contemplation / Namaste

(Chalk pastel drawing from 1983, "Composer," by am)

"When I look at the pictures and hear the songs I also see and hear the story behind them. A still photograph morphs into a home movie and a scrawl on a page evokes a scene in a room or on a street. I hear a laugh coming from somewhere off to the side...

... A song, a poem, a book, a film, an exhibit are simply representations of a period, a place, a person. And because memory is the joker in the deck I try not to take the representations of the past too seriously. Life goes on for those who live it in the present. Nostalgia, cheap or otherwise, is always costly.

I see history as a reliquary—a container where relics are kept and displayed for contemplation. So much has been written about the sixties that the more distant those years become, the more mythic the tales and the time seem to be ..."

(from A Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties, by Suze Rotolo)



Today's view from the porch, with sounds of spring:



Namaste: